


At What Price

by Clockwork



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: F/F, Heartbreak, Introspection, Meant To Be, Post canon, Realization, Spoilers, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 14:38:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18758449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clockwork/pseuds/Clockwork
Summary: Isobel has her mind back, and she is determined to learn what is truly her and what has been Noah. And in doing so realizes that some things go both ways and another's obsession is a person's fated love.Spoilers for the season finale, set moments after 1x13.





	At What Price

From the moment they had met, Isobel had loved Noah. It had been a fairytale, love at first sight, and both of them had known it. It had been kismet, fate, and in recent weeks realizing that maybe they had been fated to be in Roswell at this time and moment, she had known that Noah was her Liz or her Alex. 

Except unlike those, her fairytale romance had all been a lie.

She hadn’t loved Noah. She had been literally programmed from the inside out to love and care for him, to believe him to be her one true love, because it suited his needs to be close to her. She had been a puppet, sometimes quite literally, and a pawn, and when the veil had come off, so had the feelings that had been manufactured. 

Even before his death, she had been able to rip that from her mind, to have the closure she hadn’t known she’d needed until now. With his death though, all remnants of that love had been swept from her like cobwebs brushed away, and left her feeling free, and strong… and lonely in a way she had never thought of because since she was a teenager, she had never been alone. Not truly.

Now though it’s an acutely distressing feeling in her chest, and a cold sensation in her head, like something shiny and new and somehow metallic. It’s years of not knowing her own mind, her own thoughts, and now questioning what is truly her feelings and what is what Noah wanted her to feel. 

Testing her powers was one thing, easy enough to do, but sitting there in an empty house that represented a perfectly manicured life that had all been a lie, Isobel knew she needed to find out what was her, and what was his desires for her. 

The closet was the easiest. Ripping through things, trying them on, tossing them in piles as she decided what she liked, and what fit an image of perfect Stepford wife. Had she ever really wanted that? Had she wanted to be popular? Or was that all Noah and designing the perfect wife for his future plans?

Some things she realized she hated on sight, tossing them towards the door, knowing they had to go. Others she felt were her, her desires, the things she wanted to be and wear. She remembered how much he’d tried to talk her out of one dress, a pair of shoes he’d always ask her to change. Little things that made her realize that he hadn’t liked them, and that meant they were all her. Suddenly they were special, cherished things that she kept touching, holding to her chest, contentment spreading through her as she comes to understand that some things were truly her, that there had been parts of her to shine through, that maybe she could still find herself after all this time.

The house was next. Throwing his things in the bin, thinking about how she would explain this to the town. Not that she wanted their pity, but she knew how easy it would be to say he had left her. There was another woman - and thinking that she had picked up a vase and thrown it against the wall - and he’d taken his things and gone. She would be the hurt party, and some would wonder what she had done wrong. They might call her cold, distant, a bitch. Nothing new, Isobel knew, and she didn’t care. Just so long as he was gone. 

Picking up a picture of them, she nearly heaved it after the vase but she stopped, staring at it. Setting it back down and settling into chair nearby. He had spoken of violence as a factor in power, about how killing people had strengthened him. Tonight Noah had been killed. No, she hadn’t done the killing, but the anger she felt coiled within her, a hatred for being used and abused for years, and Isobel couldn’t help but wonder. 

Settling herself, she began to think about all that Noah had done to her. All he had taken. She had done all she had to protect him, and he had done all he could to her to fulfill his own appetites. Up to and including using her to murder three girls. He had let Michael lie to her because Michael did truly love her, but he had used has a one would a gun, a knife, a noose. 

Focusing on the picture, pouring all of that pain and anger into an energy that she directed at the image. Suddenly glass shattered, the frame twisting, not just breaking but exploding outward and raining down over the carpet. Isobel smiled. 

Her mind was her own, and she didn’t need to kill, to destroy others to find the strength to do it. She couldn’t wait to tell Max and Michael, to tell them how wrong Noah was. The thought of them though deflated her mood though. They would be off with Liz and Alex, celebrating that they had all survived, and she was reminded that if Fate were a true thing, then it had left her behind, left her alone. Maybe that was just how it was meant to be. 

Or was it.

She didn’t stop to think about it when something told her she was wrong, that she knew the answer. Grabbing her purse, not even letting herself slow down, to think it through. Working on autopilot as she drove, not watching her mirrors, not checking her speed, eyes on the road before her as she let those thoughts carry her, bringing her to a place where again she would find truth and not merely the veneer of lies that had become her life. 

Only when she found herself at the top of the ladder did Isobel stop to think. Sitting there with her legs dangling, leaning into a person that no longer sat beside her though she imagined she could feel the cold of the leather jacket against her own shoulder, the heat of Rosa’s hand in her own. Maybe the talk of the constellations that night had been Noah, but Isobel remembered a time before that. A time when she had first seen a girl at a party. She hadn’t fit in, hadn’t been one of the popular kids, but there was an energy about her, a power in the way she carried herself that took Isobel’s breath away and left her feeling as if she had been struck by lightning, seeing the world as she never had before. 

It was then that Isobel knew. What Noah had done had been his anger, his pain at Rosa seeing through him, seeing the monster he was and denying him. But maybe, also, seeing through what he had done to Isobel and realizing that the girl she loved wasn’t herself. Just as Isobel realized in that moment that Noah hadn’t loved Rosa. He had thought he had because he was as linked to Isobel as she was to him, and in that moment when Isobel had first seen the person she had been Fated to find in this place, he had thought he loved her as well. 

So much of Isobel’s life had been Noah’s subtle control, but in that moment, as she had when he was dying and she had said goodbye, she realized how much that control she’d had over him as well. In loving so deeply and so instantaneously, that love had changed them both, and had signed Rosa’s death warrant as well. In the end Rosa had never loved Noah, and had balked in accepting his gift of dead girls like so many mice left by a cat on the doorstep. Neither of them had loved Noah. It had been their own love that shaped his obsession. 

Tears overwhelmed Isobel, coursing down her cheeks and wetting her blouse. Tears for a love that had destroyed them both. Tears for a girl who had been brave and strong and wild and untamed. Crying for the loss not of a husband she’d known for years, but for a girl who she had barely known, had embraced for a short time, and who had died for that love. 

Just as Max and Michael had, Isobel too now knew that she had truly been destined by the very universe itself to find an all consuming, powerful love, and had lost it in what seemed the same breath. 

Not realizing that Max and Michael had lost their love in those moments when Isobel was realizing the truth. One through sacrifice, and one through pain. And through that sacrifice had brought Isobel’s love back to this world, at a price that Isobel would never recover from.


End file.
